March 09, 2022

Sex and Fantasy Suites–by MTSE Master’s Degree Candidate Intern, Nayla Lee

March 09, 2022/ Nayla Lee

My first reaction to finding out about the fantasy suites on The Bachelor was disbelief. It was the late Spring of 2018, and I was in a hotel room in Detroit at a Planned Parenthood conference. I was reeling from a breakup and had only recently decided to throw myself into the arms of the 14th Bachelorette, Becca Kufrin. My assigned roommate, a stranger, asked if I was looking forward to fantasy suites in the upcoming episode. I didn’t know what she was talking about-- I was not yet the Bachelor historian that I am now.

I was floored when she explained fantasy suites as “the place where the contestants have sex.”

February 10, 2022

The Untold History of the First PRIDE

February 10, 2022/ Yali Bitan

-by guest blogger and MTSE Advisory Board Member Yali Bitan, they/them

Years before pride was associated with corporate parades, gay folks had to fight for their right to party.

Many people associate the beginning of gay activism/organization/protest with the 1969 uprising at the Stonewall Inn in New York, but few know about the Black Cat protest of 1967.

At the time, homosexual activity was criminalized, and gay bars were routinely raided by police. “Kissing was a crime; cross-dressing was a crime. If you were arrested and identified as being gay, you could lose your job, your income, your house, your family." - Alexei Romanoff activist & owner of New Faces, another local gay bar.

January 12, 2022

Guest Blogger Griselda Gines, B.S., Public Health, Shares Her Journey Story

January 12, 2022/ Griselda Gines

This past fall, Cal State Northridge Intern Griselda Gines researched external professional development opportunities for the MTSE team. She has expressed to us that this internship allowed her to reflect upon the importance of sexual health education, and to understand that comprehensive sex ed includes a broad scope of issues. She has written this deeply personal blog post in which she shares her personal truth, which has helped to heal and strengthen her. We’ve loved having Griselda as part of our team, and we are certain she will continue to advocate for healthy conversations about sex.

TW: child sexual abuse, sexual assault, miscarriage

I grew up in a strict Catholic Mexican household in which, as a woman, we had daily chores to do and were expected to behave a certain way. Every Sunday we attended mass and had dinner at 6pm everyday followed by chores and our favorite telenovelas. At an early age, my two sisters and I knew when there was anything sexual being displayed on TV; we had to look away. My grandmother took care of her 7 grandkids until I was six years old. After that my sisters and I would stay home alone until my parents came home.

November 10, 2021

We're Back! Live & In Person!

November 10, 2021/ Emmalinda MacLean

One of the highlights of being on campus is running into students from previous years, and the Pasadena Waldorf High School students made our day when a group of them saw us walking into the main office, and one announced to her friends, “Those are the sex-ed people!”

Yep, that’s us, we’re back, and it’s great to see you too.

October 13, 2021

Reality+ Love+ Dating+ Relationships+ Reality Dating Shows & Sex Education: Guest Blogger Nayla Lee Asks, “What Is TV Teaching?”

October 13, 2021/ Nayla Lee

Guest blogger Nayla Lee writes:

“Everyone knows that The Bachelor’s main goal is to portray healthy relationships and positive sexuality!

“Just kidding!

“The evolution of shows like The Bachelor, which has been airing for nearly two decades, reflects what producers and editors believe is an acceptable depiction of love, intimacy and relationships, and has the capacity to influence what viewers see as mainstream or normative. This cyclical relationship, through which the show is shaped by pop culture and, in turn, shapes it, makes it a rich topic for analysis. From the perspective of More Than Sex Ed’s sexuality and relationship programming, I am excited to share a very condensed version of my main takeaways from consuming the Bachelor franchise and related media.”

September 08, 2021

MTSE Co-Founder Emmalinda MacLean Trains Sex-Ed Teachers for a New Texas Organization

September 08, 2021/ Emmalinda MacLean

I’ve been joking for years that my life’s mission is to raise an army of sex educators. Well, the joke is on Texas, because last month we started the Dallas branch. I couldn’t be prouder to support a like-minded startup taking flight in another city, and I am in deep admiration of the courage of the Texan sex-educators I met there.

If you’re wondering what qualifies a person to be a comprehensive sex-educator, or how we can teach someone to do it in a weekend, think about how people become parents. There’s a lot to know and to learn, it’s the work of a lifetime to get good at, but you don’t have to be perfect or know everything to be a great parent to a child who needs you.

August 10, 2021

The Questions Students Are Asking — and why they’re important! By Guest Blogger Sam Joson

August 10, 2021/ Sam Joson

More Than Sex-Ed gives students the opportunity to ask questions anonymously after each class session. Sure, there’s always a fair number of troll questions, but most of them truly show the different ways young people are learning to move through the world. Below, we explore the kinds of questions students are asking by grade level and why it’s important to pay attention to what they want to know.

June 07, 2021

Someone asked us recently about our favorite books to give the parents of a new baby, and we couldn’t love this question more.

June 07, 2021/ Emmalinda MacLean

A family library builds a love of literacy from a young age, and reading to a child is proven to be one of the best things a caring adult can do to support their cognitive development. Reading together creates opportunities for healthy affection and intimacy, like ensuring that some pleasant snuggling time is a regular part of a bedtime routine.

Here are some of our favorite children’s books with beautiful art and meaningful messages that we encourage you to share with the tiny humans you love…

April 07, 2021

9-12 Year Olds and “Performative Discomfort”

April 07, 2021/ Emmalinda MacLean

There’s a certain kind of behavior we sometimes see from preteens, especially when class is discussing body parts or functions, that we describe as “performative discomfort”. Kids this age will go out of their way to tell us that they find the material “gross”, they use the barfing-emoji, they tell us they’re disturbed, they ask why we have to talk about these matters before lunch. Sometimes they seem to be telegraphing to their peers that they consider this topic taboo or off limits. We understand—and we remind students—that discomfort is a natural and very understandable part of the learning and growth process.

March 03, 2021

Brave New World: The Perks of Virtual Sex Ed

March 03, 2021/ Emmalinda MacLean

I trust that by now we’re all pretty familiar with the frustrations and drawbacks of online education, and we join with parents and students in hoping to be back in classrooms in person as soon as it’s safe to do so. But the more virtual sex-ed classes we present, the more we’ve noticed certain unmistakable advantages to the remote model too—and we hope to be able to re-create some of these benefits in a post-pandemic future.

March 02, 2021

Destigmatizing Pleasure to Dismantle Sexual Shame

March 02, 2021/ Jill Herbertson

Even as a very young child, I was aware of the stigma and taboo surrounding the subject of sex. Society’s discomfort with sex was apparent in the hushed tones people tended to use when speaking of it; it was apparent in the flustered demeanor my parents adopted when I would ask a question about a line in a movie, or a song; and it was apparent in the fact that, when I was 10 years old, my mom took me out of the house (“an outing, just the two of us”) in order to have “the talk” in private.

December 09, 2020

Spotlight on Our Shift to Online Learning

December 09, 2020/ Emmalinda MacLean

When our school clients switched to remote-learning in the spring, we, like so many other educators, figured out a brand new way to teach.

We’ve learned about so many online tools for teaching, but thankfully lots of the familiar elements of our workshops are part of our e-learning program, and a lot of the questions from kids are reassuringly the same. Teens are wondering about body parts and media messages and masturbation and just what exactly causes a pregnancy, or wondering if they can make their sex-ed teacher laugh. (They often can. One of the perks of the job). But some questions we’ve never had to answer before: one young person asked “will I ever have a first kiss because of covid?”

November 04, 2020

Raising Anti-Racist Kids!

November 04, 2020/ Emmalinda MacLean

Helping parents and caregivers have hard conversations with kids is one of our favorite things to do. Last month, we debuted a new program to do exactly that: supporting family discussions about race and anti-racism with the same values-centered lens we encourage for talks about sex and sexuality. The client (Akamai) was our first international corporation, and the program was a joint venture between their employee-parent group and their employees-of-color group. Our first session was a hit, full of lively chatter and awesome questions, and a much larger-than-expected turnout. We’re looking forward to our next workshop and we’d love to bring this program to a parent group near you!

November 04, 2020

Public Health in a Pandemic--Guest Blogger Laura Gulizia

November 04, 2020/ Laura Gulizia

“Seriously?” I say to myself as I hear that word on my television: pandemic. Oh, sure I know what that means since my major at Cal State Northridge is Public Health and as a student, I am taught and tested on the different disease outbreaks pretty much every semester. Yep, I chose to be in Public Health about a year before the global pandemic that is called COVID 19 decided to spread like wildfire throughout this world. So, what does this mean for me?

September 02, 2020

Single In A Pandemic--Guest Blogger Rosie DePaul

September 02, 2020/ Rosie De Paul

So you want to talk about what it’s like to be single? Like really, extraordinarily single. Well, try being single and have your roommate move out during a pandemic.

After a year of a level of socializing I had previously only aspired to, I returned from a work trip and the world shut down. Within 5 days, I had lost two of my three jobs and all the coworkers that went along with that, my roommate had moved home to a different state, and I was quarantined with just my kitchen, cello, tv, and running shoes to keep me occupied.

September 02, 2020

Clara’s Journey From Student to Board Member

September 02, 2020/ Clara Pierone

I was incredibly lucky to have had this education which the overwhelming majority of my peers didn’t have the opportunity to participate in. This is why I jumped on the opportunity to intern at MTSE last summer, I was excited by the chance to get to be a part of this work which is so important.

June 18, 2020

Black Lives Matter. Here’s What We’re Doing to Make our Classes and our Organization Actively Antiracist

June 18, 2020/ Emmalinda MacLean

Wow. What times we are living in. Our hearts are with you, whatever you are grieving or fearing; whatever you are celebrating, if not the way you had hoped. We’re wishing you all a happy pride month; rest assured it doesn’t take a big glittery rainbow parade for us to be proud of all our beautiful LGBTQ siblings and all of their courage, resilience, and joy. We are especially proud of all those activists and organizers centering the movement for Black lives in this year’s pride celebrations: none of us are free until all of us are free.

May 15, 2020

We Have a Winner!

May 15, 2020/ Jill Herbertson

Robin Darling, Advisory Board Member, has been involved in sexuality education for over two decades. She began her career in the field as a peer educator for Planned Parenthood during high school. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Sociology from the University of California, San Diego (2004).

March 13, 2020

Intersections of Sexuality and a Viral Pandemic

March 13, 2020/ Emmalinda MacLean

Today marks our company’s first cancelled sex-ed classes of the Coronavirus outbreak.

We are working to figure out, along with our client schools and the rest of Los Angeles, what we can do to help prevent the spread of illness and care for our communities—below are a few early thoughts; feel free to share yours.

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